Review by Ed Quillen
Mountain Life – August 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Monkey Wrench Dad: Dispatches from the backyard frontline
by Ken Wright
Published in 2008 by Raven’s Eye Press
ISBN 978-0-9816534-0-7
KEN WRIGHT is an energetic and engaging essayist +whose words sometimes grace these pages, although nothing from Colorado Central is in this collection of work. These pieces first appeared in places like Durango Magazine, Mountain Gazette, Writers on the Range, and Inside/Outside Southwest.
Wright, who spent some youthful time near Buena Vista guiding float trips down the Arkansas River, makes it clear in this anthology that his heart belongs to the Colorado Plateau and its rivers, especially the San Juan as it courses through the Goosenecks near the Four Corners.
What I like best about his work, and it’s apparent throughout the 42 essays here, is his cheerful abandonment of political correctness. It’s fun to get outdoors with Wright and the guys (part of “the Tribe” ) and drink beer and smoke cigars — especially since hardly anybody celebrates such pleasures in prose any more. Nor do you read much praise of dive bars or occasional bouts of over-indulgence. Our public discourse has become unduly sanitized.
As you might have guessed from the title, Wright is a major fan of Edward Abbey, and here he blends Abbey’s anarchic exuberance with the responsibilities of parenthood. It’s not easy, as he points out; he manages to stay in the same house in a town he loves, but never keeps a job for very long.
The best piece here is his visit to Ridges Basin near Durango, now being excavated to store water for the Animas-La Plata Project:
“People, too, have found a home here. Most recently, the Bodo family worked this land since 1914. Their homestead and ranching remnants still can be found throughout the basin. Off to the left hides an old outhouse, alone and abandoned off in the trees, with a great view, of course.
“The Bodo family gave up ranching in the 1970s, but not their love of the land that fed their family for generations. In 1974, they sold their land to the Nature Conservancy, with a heart-felt wish written as a clause in the deed: that Ridges Basin stay wild for wildlife forever. And when the Nature Conservancy turned over the basin to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, to become the Bodo Wildlife Area, that clause remained intact. Today, an estimated 300 mule deer reside here, and as many as 1,000 migrate through in the fall; 100 elk live here year-round, and another 400 winter here, and in May and June, the basin serves as vital elk-calving grounds.
“A place for wild life, and public land for the Durango area’s wild people. Forever.
“Forever, that is, until the Bureau of Reclamation decided it needed the basin for the Animas-La Plata Project, perhaps the government’s last great Western water project, the last gasp of the era of big dams.”
And the stored water, Wright points out, will go to golf courses, as well as to the coal-fired electric-generating plant that will pump the water 500 feet up from the Animas River to the reservoir. He concludes with “Have you ever looked at some familiar ridge near your own home, wondered what’s on the other side. You should. You should find out, while you still can. If you can stand to really see what’s being lost.”
Good advice, especially as we see a resurgence in the extractive industries that abandoned the West a quarter-century ago.
As the “Dad” in the book’s title indicates, many of these essays concern raising children to enjoy the unmediated outdoors in a mediated era of video games, cell phones, and text-messaging. Wright’s solution is simple: play hooky with your kids, be it skiing or river-running or “camping” with an RV, just to see what it’s like.
I can testify from personal experience this form of “home schooling” works pretty well, and Wright obviously has a great time with his son and daughter as they grow up.
As with any anthology, this one has a few weak entries, and some pieces seem a bit too much like others, always a hazard for a writer who works in many markets.
Monkey Wrench Dad is probably best enjoyed in small pieces, rather than all at once; the essays were originally written to stand by themselves, and still do. We reviewers, alas, seldom have time to savor that luxury.
All in all, this is a fine collection, one that brings joy and laughter at what we have in our public-lands country, and sorrow for what we have lost and may still lose.
